Claire Morgan

GALERIE KARSTEN GREVE
5, rue Debelleyme
January 16–February 25

Claire Morgan, Silver Lining, 2009, taxidermied barn owl and rat, thistle seeds, dandelion seeds, lead weights, nylon, acrylic, 75 x 24 x 24".

From the far side of the gallery, Architecture, 2009, one of Claire Morgan’s suspended installations, almost disappears into thin air. From a grate of clear acrylic dowels on the ceiling hang rows of nylon fishing line, threaded through the minuscule bodies of hundreds of dead fruit flies in exact planes that stack up to form intersecting architectural rectangles nine feet high. Above and below the rectangles, a few flies break away along the threads, either dissipating from or coalescing into their cubic swarm, a ghostly mapping of the unknowable or unseeable geometry of animal behavior. This combination of meticulous perfection and organic movement, of stasis and irruption, runs through each of the Belfast-born artist’s installations, populated by hovering protagonists from the natural world. In Silver Lining, 2009, instead of gnats, Morgan has beaded her suspended nylon-line grid with individual thistle and dandelion spores. At the top of this precision-woven geometry of organic dust in space, a menacing owl; tumbling through the bottom, a splayed rat.

In addition to these staged narrative dramas, Morgan’s first solo show in France is particularly noteworthy for the formal drama among the nine installations themselves and the related works on paper. Morgan carries out the taxidermy of her animal subjects, slicing, skinning the carcasses of a hedgehog, a pigeon, an owl, spilling blood and preservative chemicals on top of watercolor paper like an operating table. She then draws her crisp architectural plans on that paper alongside the traces of the taxidermic process. To see the guts and the grid, the muck of the process and its imagined completion on paper, and then to hope to find the drawing materialized in the next room, the thousand spores shivering on their threads as projected, is truly a study in suspense.

— Julia Langbein

Jean Michel Alberola

GALERIE DANIEL TEMPLON
30, rue Beaubourg
January 9–March 6

Jean-Michel Alberola, Celui qui cycliste (The One Who Bicycles), 2002, oil on canvas, 39 3/8 x 31 7/8".

Jean Michel Alberola’s exhibition at this gallery offers his latest series of works, which range from paintings to wall drawings. Through a patchwork of figurative and abstract elements, along with occasional bursts of Dada-esque writing, the artist develops a visual language that remains at the edge between explicit meaning and unconscious emotion. This juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated elements creates a double metamorphosis whereby words and letters are reduced to mere graphic components, while abstract shapes and colors take on a rich symbolic meaning.

In the oil painting Celui qui montre (The One Who Shows), 2009, Alberola prompts the viewer to imagine an anthropomorphic silhouette from no more than a pair of freestanding feet and a red hat literally lost in the middle of numerous overlapping, irregular shapes that resemble an aerial view of geographic topographies. Alberola challenges the viewer to find meaning in a seemingly meaningless juxtaposition of shapes, words, and colors. In the wall painting executed in situ, La Sortie est à l’intérieur (The Exit Is Inside), 2010, Alberola’s medium recalls frescoes, his writing evokes street art, and his words bring to mind Marcel Duchamp. Despite Alberola’s use of traditional media, the artist nonetheless questions assumptions with his enigmatic works and words. Beyond conjuring pure aesthetic emotions, the result engages viewers in an interactive search for meaning, as they attempt to derive one holistic message from a multitude of stimuli.

— Julia Moreno de Rouvray

Grégory Derenne

GALERIE BERTRAND GRIMONT
47 Rue De Montmorency
January 18–March 13

Grégory Derenne, Plato 1, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 45 x 57 1/2".

Grégory Derenne’s interior landscapes––figurative paintings of television soundstages, art galleries, and shop fronts––balance photorealism with an exaggerated sense of light and darkness. Typically working from his own photographs, Derenne builds his compositions atop a base of black paint, punctuating his canvases with strokes of bright white, pale blue, pink, or yellow––points of light that melt across his carefully constructed spaces. Like Degas, who consistently pulled his viewpoint of the theater stage back into the shadows, seemingly peeking out from behind the curtains at the ballerinas, Derenne places his perspective outside the action, withdrawing to a position likely unseen and unnoticed by those we are observing.

A number of his neatly composed large-scale acrylic works depict sets of various French television programs––each identifiable through a signature decor or color scheme. However, we are unable to identify the personalities on the live platform, as Derenne turns our attention to the otherwise-invisible structures (cameras, spotlights, and backdrops) necessary for the production of the spectacle. In the background of Plato Guillaume Durand, 2009, we see an image of Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God, 2007, a work that was the catalyst for an international performance of wealth, publicity, and power. Derenne incorporates a blurred image of Hirst’s sculpture into his visual commentary on the creation of illusion.

Recently, Derenne has started to work in oil, producing a series of small-scale paintings, titled “Puit” (Well), 2009, that maintain the staging of his larger compositions. Picturing collectors in dark suits, seen through skylights installed above a basement-level space, Derenne uses the edge of the windows as a natural frame for his compositions, choosing an angle where our gaze has no chance of meeting that of the subjects. Although Derenne places himself as outsider in these images, he reveals a clear sense of the dynamics of the scenes he so studiously observes.

— Lillian Davies

Øystein Aasan

LA VITRINE
24 rue Moret,
December 17–February 20

View of “Øystein Aasan,” 2009. From left: Display Unit (UT UT UT), 2007; Double Trouble, 2009; Devil’s Canyon (Like jungle beasts they fight for her love!), 2009; and Memory Game, 2009.

Norwegian artist Øystein Aasan has something up his sleeve: controlled explosions of images or text that stealthily disarm their reader. Aasan divides his source materials into small squares, spaced at small intervals, as if a grid of negative space has wedged apart the image. In “Double Trouble,” his modest presentation at La Vitrine, a poster of Alfred Werker’s 1953 Devil’s Canyon has been thusly “pixelated” and affixed to Alu-Dibond panels. In Display Unit (UT UT UT), 2007, the gridded content is a phrase from Finnegans Wake. Printed on slanted shelves in a “display unit” lined with mirror paper, the isolated characters seem to float off into their reflections, making reading a feat of memory to battle the Babel in Joyce’s babble. The Tower of Babel, incidentally, is a reference Aasan attributes to his ongoing work and source archive Never ending memory, which is absent from the exhibition but adumbrated by two other works in the show: Double Trouble, 2009, resembles a series of long troughs placed vertically, echoing the hand-built drawers that house the archive. Memory Game, 2009, is a short sequence of slides in which blanks alternate with selections from these files, photographed together in a vitrine, like cards in the eponymous game. The opening moments of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) come to mind—“the image of happiness” intercut with black leader—as does the pliable narrative promise of the photographs in W. G. Sebald’s novels.

There is something forlorn about this tribute to memory, a faculty under siege; the anachronistic efforts of the pastime seem to buckle under Aasan’s crisp aesthetic, which itself embraces the currently ubiquitous look of nostalgia. Just like images in the children’s game of Memory, Aasan’s materials—plywood, MDF, anonymous photos, and imagery appropriated from old B-grade culture—pop up all over the place these days. That he can nonetheless invest them with pathos and surprise makes his memory game look indeed like a magic trick.

— Joanna Fiduccia

Elina Brotherus

GB AGENCY
20, rue Louise Weiss
January 9–March 20

Elina Brotherus, La Liseuse (Reader), 2001, color photograph, 27 1/2 x 22".

This gallery devotes two consecutive shows over the season to Finnish photographer and video artist Elina Brotherus: the current retrospective of medium- to large-format color photographs from the past ten years, followed by an exhibition of new photographs and video. The retrospective reveals Brotherus to be moving away from the self-portraiture of her early series “Das Mädchen sprach von Liebe” (The Girl Spoke of Love), 1997–1999, in which the artist bares tears and bruises that index an episode of real-life grief, toward a self-consciously antidocumentary photographic practice motivated by concerns of pictorial composition rooted in the history of painting. This shift might be symbolized in Brotherus’s progression of pictures by a gradual 180-degree turn of the subject (usually the artist herself): She faces down the camera in the early series, whereas in “The New Painting,” 2000–2004, and “Model Studies,” 2002–, figures are viewed from behind, foregrounding expansive landscapes that have provoked comparison to the Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich. Brotherus stops short of art-historical game playing, but her referents are more specific than a mere painterly concern for color or perspectival cues. The matte, white unblemishedness of the nude favored as a subject by the nineteenth-century academy is unmistakable in Baigneuse, orage montant (Bather, Rising Storm), 2003; the naked figure perches on a rock before a rippling sea that recedes to the horizon without modulations in focus—a wealth of glassy, lapidary detail that nearly boasts its skillful brush. The thematic codes of the Salon permeate, in model studies, bathers, and a woman at her toilette. In the exquisite Liseuse (Reader), 2001, sunlight ignites the silhouette of a woman engrossed in a book; a shopping bag momentarily glowing like frosted glass, the fibers of a frayed red cuff, and the gossamer surface of the reader’s wrist compel too strongly to leave room for grief.

— Julia Langbein

Keren Cytter

LE PLATEAU
angle de la rue des alouettes et de la rue carducci
December 9–February 14

Keren Cytter, Repulsion, 2005, still from a three-channel color video, 5 minutes.

This exhibition, Keren Cytter’s first in France, consists of the videos Four Seasons, 2009, Something Happened, 2007, Der Spiegel (The Mirror), 2007, The Mysterious Series, 2000–2006, In Search for Brothers, 2008, Repulsion, 2006, and Untitled, 2009. There is also a small room of drawings, as well as the larger drawings Vinyl, 2009, and Pentagram, 2009, each of which, we are told, bears a structural relationship to the video that follows in the next room. Additionally, there is a table with copies of Cytter publications, including her novels The Man Who Climbed Up the Stairs of Life and Found Out They Were Cinema Seats (2005) and The Seven Most Exciting Hours of Mr. Trier’s Life in Twenty-four Chapters (2008). The videos have all been shown previously. The show is constructed, like each of the videos, as a conceptual labyrinth (the wall texts, for instance, contradict one another) and is, as expected, impressive. What comes across in particular is the artist’s extraordinary technical agility, on all levels, as well as the exceptional evenness, or aloofness, or perhaps insouciance, of her tone: Though each individual video (virtually all of which culminate in, or begin with, murder) is histrionic, her practice, considered as a whole, is unmannered, without a hint of struggle or strain. Also noteworthy is the offhand sadism throughout—a mannered sexual savagery of a most specific bourgeois, modern European type.

— David Lewis

Bettina Samson

LA GALERIE
La Galerie, 1, rue Jean-Jaurès, Noisy-le-Sec,
December 5–February 13

Bettina Samson, Spectre Solarie, 2009, mixed materials. Installation view.

When the art historian Hal Foster coined the term “archival impulse,” he was referring to the practice of collecting and reordering historical information that he identified in the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn and Tacita Dean. The works on display in Bettina Samson’s solo exhibition also come under this category: They, too, interweave disparate events and temporalities, generating alternative archival systems that breathe new life into historical facts.

The show opens with a group of objects and photographs referring to key moments in the history of modern science. White flashes on the photos—produced by exposing the film to the radioactive mineral pitchblende—materialize the phenomenon of radioactivity while also documenting the artist’s reenactment of the circumstances surrounding its accidental discovery by the French physicist Becquerel in 1896. A giant replica of the latter’s workbench evokes a monument to the glory of science, while beneath it a small plaque displays a letter written by Albert Einstein to President Roosevelt in 1939, containing recommendations relating to the development of the atomic bomb.

A second group of works likewise underscores the shortcomings of utopian visions. Five statuettes exuding confidence and joy represent members of the short-lived Californian socialist colony Llano del Rio. Alongside them, a book by Aldous Huxley, who years later happened to live close to its ruins, outlines the reservations of the author of Brave New World about this utopian project. Elsewhere, a black-and-white video shows faint, blurred images of a previous exhibition by the artist. Comprising some of the same works now on view, it bears an uncanny resemblance to the present show. By pinpointing instances of serendipity, coincidence, inadequacy, and similarity, Samson’s archival structures sharpen our vision of the past while inviting us to rethink the present.

— Rahma Khazam